The first time Frank Luntz met Rep. Billy Tauzin, the Louisiana congressman was drinking beer with his friends in a box at an Orioles game. It was the fall of 1995, and Tauzin had just joined the Republican party after eight terms in the House as a Democrat. Luntz, who makes his living giving advice to Republican politicians, smelled a business opportunity and offered Tauzin a lift home. “I have never seen someone go from good old boy to precise and philosophical so quickly,” Luntz remembers excitedly. “The entire car ride we talked about deregulation, federal vs. state policies. The guy was brilliant, an intellectual. An hour before, I had thought of him as a beer-drinking southerner. Then I realized that he’s both.”
Luntz is legendary for flattering his clients, both current and potential, but when he talks about Tauzin, the praise sounds almost genuine. “He’s absolutely one of the best communicators the Republicans have,” Luntz says. ” The more he is out front, the better the Republican party will do.” Luntz pauses for a moment, reflecting. “One of my dreams,” he says, “is to see Billy on TV most weekends.”
Tauzin isn’t yet a fixture on the Sunday shows, but he is becoming one of the Republican party’s most conspicuous spokesmen. Last fall, Newt Gingrich asked Tauzin to appear with majority leader Dick Armey at a series of forums around the country where the two could debate their respective tax plans — Armey touting his fiat-tax proposal, Tauzin pushing a retail-sales tax. Though it seemed to some within the party leadership an unusually high- profile assignment for such a new Republican, Gingrich was confident that Tauzin would succeed. Converts, Gingrich reasoned, often make the best apostles. Plus, he was sure Tauzin would be popular with audiences.
Gingrich turned out to be right on both counts. But Tauzin’s greatest skills are those he deploys inside Washington. An ideological conservative with the style of an old-time southern Democrat, Tauzin is effective in Congress precisely because he is many things other Republican leaders should be but aren’t: crafty, tough, witty, deft at compromise, charming. Tauzin isn’t the sort of person who would have led the Republican realignment, but he’s one of the few in his adopted party who are adept at managing it.
Wilbert “Billy” Tauzin grew up in a Cajun household in south Louisiana, the son of an electrician. After graduation from Nicholls State University, he worked as a pipe fitter, then took a job as personal secretary to a state senator named Harvey Peltier Jr., a member of one of the region’s bestknown families. Peltier wasn’t interested in what Tauzin calls “all the technicalities of being a state senator,” so for four years Tauzin stood in for him, drafting Peltier’s bills, handling them in committee, even voting the senator’s machine most of the time. For a budding politician, it was the perfect apprenticeship. In 1971, after earning a law degree from Louisiana State University, Tauzin ran for a seat himself. Though young and relatively unknown, he was a credible candidate, thanks to his affiliation with Peltier. “It was like getting a Washington Post endorsement,” says James Carville, who grew up in the area and worked on Tauzin’s first campaign for Congress.
Tauzin won with 62 percent of the vote and went on to serve nine years in the Louisiana House. His mentor during those years was Rep. Risley C. “Pappy” Triche, a onetime segregationist who in the 1970s renounced his unsavory past and became the chief floor leader for then-governor Edwin Edwards. Tauzin describes Triche as “the most brilliant political mind I have ever encountered, a master politician.” Few who saw Triche in action disagree. Jack Wardlaw, a political reporter for the New Orleans Times-Picayune who has covered the Louisiana legislature since 1972, says that Triche could convince virtually anyone of virtually anything. On one occasion, says Wardlaw, “he even switched gears in mid-speech. He was speaking against a bill and someone came up and slipped him a note saying the governor wanted it passed. So Pappy switched right there. He said, ‘Now that I’ve told you what’s wrong with the bill, let me tell you what’s right with it.’ And it worked. The bill passed.”
Triche was a compelling role model, and Tauzin paid close attention, making friends and learning to persuade. Having overcome a profound speech impediment in his youth, Tauzin evolved into a skilled orator. His mentor was impressed by Tauzin’s ability. “I told him early on,” says Triche, now retired from politics, “‘Don’t stay in the Louisiana legislature too long, son, you got too much talent.'” Tauzin took the advice and in 1980, in a special election, won a congressional seat on his first try.
Louisiana has a long tradition of faithfully returning its incumbents to office, but Tauzin wasn’t taking chances. He maintained close contact with his constituents back in the state, following the example of his political hero, former governor Earl Long. “Earl would go into a country store and there would be a row of hats hanging from a string on the ceiling,” explains Tauzin. “He’d buy every one, then he’d put them in his trunk and go for a drive. He’d pass by a farmer riding his tractor in a field. The governor would stop the car, put on one of the hats, and walk up to the farmer. He’d say, ‘You look hot. Why don’t you put this on?’ And the farmer would remember that for the rest of his life: ‘Earl Long gave me the hat off his head.’ Then Earl would drive on and find another farmer.” In place of hats, Tauzin sent out stacks of personal letters to his constituents, showed up at countless events back in the district. Tauzin also built an effective state fund- raising organization, known as The Billy Club.
Before long, there was little need for the money he had raised. In five of his nine subsequent elections, Tauzin faced no opponent at all, and some of his campaigns cost under $ 20,000. Challengers, when they existed, tended to be weak. (One was a man Tauzin had successfully defended in a murder case years before. The man, a tavern owner, had shot an unarmed patron. During the campaign, Tauzin agreed to debate the challenger “any time, any place, except in a barroom.”) Even when the boundaries of his congressional district shifted dramatically, as they have five times since 1980, Tauzin easily kept his seat. “I was there when they were redrawn,” he explains, grinning. ” Nobody has more friends in the Louisiana state legislature than I do.”
Tauzin spent 15 years in Congress as a Democrat, all of them in the party’s conservative wing. He was one of only two Democrats in the House to support every item in the Contract With America (Ralph Hall of Texas being the other). He voted for Ronald Reagan. On topics like gun control and abortion, Tauzin found himself to the right of many Republicans.
Conservative as he was, Tauzin didn’t begin to break with the Democratic party until 1993. In that year, he voted for the first version of Clinton’s tax package in return for a pledge from Clinton that he would get credit for helping to kill the BTU tax it contained. As it turned out, however, news of Tauzin’s opposition to the BTU tax never filtered back to energy-industry lobbyists in Louisiana. By the time the Senate finally removed the tax from the bill, Tauzin had been subjected to intense criticism from his constituents. He emerged from the experience convinced Bill Clinton had betrayed him. “You can only burn people so many times,” he told the Times- Picayune. “In my case, you burn me once and that’s it.” Soon after, Tauzin began to chart his exit from the party. One of the first things he did was hire a new press secretary, Ken Johnson, a lifelong Republican.
Johnson, a flamboyant former New Orleans television reporter who favors black clothing, is famous for his ability to get press attention. (The speaker of the Louisiana House recently sent several members of his staff to talk to Johnson to discover how he gets his boss’s name in the newspaper so often.) Tauzin promptly made Johnson not only his communications director, but also his campaign manager and chief political adviser. Together, the two devised a strategy for Tauzin’s party switch: Tauzin picked fights with prominent Democrats over policy questions; Johnson made certain the conflicts were well covered in the Louisiana press. His battles with the Democratic leadership helped Tauzin’s constituents understand his ideological differences with the party. More important, they allowed Tauzin to join the newly elected Republican majority without being perceived as a political opportunist. In August 1995, he made the switch.
Although more than 70 percent of the voters in Tauzin’s home district are registered Democrats, few seemed to mind his conversion. Indeed, only a single prominent Democrat, Sam Jones, the mayor of the town of Franklin, even made noises about running against Tauzin. When they learned about the possible challenge, both Tauzin and Ken Johnson called Jones, Tauzin from a cellular phone during proceedings on the House floor. Congressional races are tougher than you think, Tauzin warned. Plus, he said, your family would hate Washington. Jones, whose 12year-old daughter had locked herself in a closet when he told his family he might run for Congress, quickly buckled. Tauzin was reelected in 1996 with no opposition, becoming the first congressional party-switcher in history to run again unchallenged. Harry Lee, the sheriff of Jefferson Parish outside New Orleans and a wellconnected Louisiana Democrat, says that switching parties was never a threat to Tauzin back home, challenger or not. “It had absolutely no effect on his ability to get elected, ” Lee says. “Billy is still Billy. He’s the kind of person that people in the Third District like. He’s a fun-loving guy. He’s got an outgoing personality.”
That’s for sure. Tauzin enjoys politics because it gives him an excuse to talk to strangers. From the moment he gets up till the time he goes to bed 20 hours later, Tauzin never stops moving, grinning, laughing, squeezing arms, snapping rubber bands, plotting, dispensing advice. He tells jokes constantly, usually crude ones about a fictional Cajun character named Boudreaux whose wife is forever cheating on him. As a Democrat or a Republican, Tauzin must surely be among the least boring members of Congress.
During an hour-long car trip between appointments in Texas not long ago, Tauzin launched into an almost stream-of-consciousness string of vignettes and stories, beginning with the time he and a couple friends went frog hunting in a bayou after dark. Around midnight, their boat hit a submerged tree and sank. The three spent the night floating around the swamp with a case of beer worrying about alligators. “A helicopter picked us up at 9:00 a. m., and by noon I was giving a speech in New Orleans,” Tauzin says. Before he can explain what the speech was about, Ken Johnson interrupts and the two fall into a debate about the best way to kill an alligator. Reel him in with a dead chicken on a meat hook, argues Johnson. Not necessary, says Tauzin, just shoot him lots of times in the head with a .22.
From there the conversation turns to literature. Tauzin recites from memory some of the earthier scenes from The World According to Garp, then switches enthusiastically to the novel he has been working on since college. The book, Tauzin says, concerns the adventures of a boy named Ferd, an orphan who lives in New Orleans with his aunt, a one-legged stripper. The aunt has been maimed in a streetcar accident, but is unwilling to let the loss of a limb destroy her career. Instead, she incorporates the handicap into her act, which culminates with her throwing her prosthetic leg into the audience — leaving her, as Tauzin puts it, “the most naked stripper in New Orleans.” ” The problem is, some drunk always tries to steal the leg. So that’s Ferd’s job, to get it back. The novel opens with Ferd and a drunk wrestling with the leg on the sidewalk downtown. . . .”
And so it goes, all the way to the Dallas Morning News, where Tauzin has come to explain the retailsales tax to the newspaper’s editorial board. He gets off the elevator at the publisher’s floor singing verses from ” American Pie” and theorizing about the Kennedy assassination. Tauzin is in a buoyant mood, but the sales tax turns out to be a tough sell.
He begins by explaining that a sales tax is the fairest, most straightforward possible way to raise revenue: Everything sold in America, Tauzin says, will be subject to a 15 percent tax at the point of purchase, no exceptions. Sounds fine, reply the editorialists, but what, precisely, constitutes a “purchase”? Ways and Means chairman Bill Archer has already suggested that under a retail-sales tax, buying a home would be considered an “investment” and therefore not subject to the tax. Nor is it clear whether the tax would apply to goods and services sold by government. What about unemployed poor people? asks the board. How will government keep them from becoming even poorer once their basic expenses rise by 15 percent? And how will law enforcement respond to the enormous black market a sales tax will inevitably produce? And what about the 50 new tax-collection agencies in the states that, under the sales-tax plan, will assume the duties of the IRS? Why will they be any less frustrating and bureaucratic than the agency they are replacing?
There are few satisfactory answers to these questions, with the retail- sales tax still in the production stage, not fully evolved. Tauzin does an impressive job, considering. Sure, the tax sounds regressive, he explains, but it’s important to notice the money that a sales tax would save. When manufacturers no longer have to pay accountants and lawyers to navigate the tax code, the cost of most goods will drop by at least 15 percent. The sales tax, in other words, will practically be a wash. And anyway, says Tauzin, the very premise of the current tax system — that government should use taxes to reward or discourage varieties of behavior — is immoral. Almost anything would be an improvement over the current code, which imposes a penalty on honest labor. “The power to tax,” he says gravely, “is the power to destroy.”
The editorial writers still aren’t sold, but they’re starting to look more sympathetic. “He had a sophisticated grasp,” says one of them later. “And he was eloquent. He made me think, I’ll say that.” Under the circumstances, it is the best anyone could have done, and Tauzin does it almost entirely by force of personality.
Most of the time, Tauzin has stronger issues to work with, and he usually knows what he is talking about. He is chairman of the Telecommunications Committee and is seen as someone with a thorough understanding of the broadcasting industry. When the facts aren’t enough, however, Tauzin is not above theatrics. “Anyone who thinks that the power of ideas is the only thing that’s important in Washington has never been to Washington,” he says.
To prove it, he recounts the hearing he recently held on the need for product-liability laws to protect the medical-device industry. Tauzin wanted to make the point that because of lawsuits, many hospitals face a shortage of biomedical materials. His star witness, he says, was “a young ballerina who would have lost her leg were it not for a titanium joint that is going to have to be replaced as she grows up. She came and testified very emotionally about how she dreaded the thought that they might have to take her leg, and how she wouldn’t be able to run and jump and play with the other children if this titanium material wasn’t available to her because the manufacturer had been sued too many times. Before the hearing was over, every member of the committee, Democrat and Republican, was calling for a separate bill to deal with biomedical liability issues.”
Cancer-stricken ballerinas? Isn’t this the kind of cheap demagoguery that Democrats have been notorious for since the New Deal? Exactly, says Tauzin. And it works. In fact, “it’s a model that the Republican party needs to build on. It’s one thing to beat down the barricades and take over the town. It takes an entirely separate skill to run the town once you’ve taken it. If you don’t know how to finesse the politics, how to communicate ideas effectively, you’re not going to succeed.”
In the ballroom of the Hotel Intercontinental in Dallas, Tauzin and Dick Armey are showing an audience of about 1,000 tax activists how modern Republicans succeed. The forum has been organized by Citizens for a Sound Economy, and it is one stop on the “Scrap the Code” tour Tauzin and Armey have been leading across the country. The congressmen sit opposite each other in chairs on what looks like a talk-show set. Both wear lavaliere mikes. They take turns walking the stage rebutting one another’s tax proposals.
That’s the way the event is billed, anyway. In practice, both Tauzin and Armey spend most of their time assailing the current tax code. At one point, Tauzin tells a story about a man who was so harassed by the IRS that he shot himself in despair. “You are being stiffed by the IRS right now but you don’t even know it,” he yells to the audience in a Louisiana accent that has become noticeably thicker. Standing in the middle of the stage, his coat buttoned, shoulders thrown back, feet apart, jabbing the air with a pen for emphasis, Tauzin suddenly looks a lot like a trimmer Earl Long. The crowd loves it. Ken Johnson looks on approvingly. “You should have seen what it was like in Atlanta,” he says. “It reminded me of a Jimmy Swaggart revival meeting. I thought, ‘We’ve got to pass the plate when this thing is over.'”
Two hours later, the event is still going on. By 9:30 workmen are taking down the lights and disassembling the podium, and Dick Armey has long since gone home. But no such thought seems to have occurred to Tauzin. Though he has been talking about the tax code almost without a break since 6:30 in the morning, he appears happy to keep talking. Sitting on the stage surrounded by people asking questions and seeking autographs, Tauzin looks like he could spend the rest of the night here. He definitely could, says Johnson, who seems eager to wrap things up and head for the bar. “The hardest thing in the world,” he says, “is to get Billy out of a crowd.”
Where does Tauzin go from here? By all accounts, he is happy in the House. Last year, he gave up a relatively sure shot at a Senate seat for the chance to take control of the Telecommunications Committee. But as much as he likes his new job, Tauzin claims he is capable of leaving elected office someday. ” I’m not going to grow old in the House,” he says. Six years ago, Tauzin says he was approached by a Washington lobbying firm with an offer that paid $ 1 million a year. “That would be $ 6 million by now,” he says, slightly wistful. “Maybe when I come to my senses, I’ll take a job like that.”
In the meantime, rumors have circulated that Tauzin, who has been an energetic fund-raiser for Republican candidates around the country, is in line for a position in the House leadership, perhaps as majority leader when Dick Armey steps down or retires. “Billy has got an outside chance to be the next speaker,” says columnist Bob Novak, who floated the idea recently. “I think he’d be excellent. I think he’d be more of a traditional speaker, rather than a handson, dealing-with-every-single-bill kind of speaker.”
Both Tauzin and Johnson blush at the suggestion. Becoming speaker of the House “isn’t likely,” Tauzin says, and he is right. Tauzin swears he has traveled the country on his vacation time speaking to audiences about the sales tax, not out of personal ambition, but as a favor to Gingrich, and because he believes the Republicans, as a party, could use the good publicity. If anything, says Johnson, Tauzin has his eyes on the chairmanship of the Commerce Committee, which he is in line to inherit. “It’s got jurisdiction over the entire American economy,” says Johnson. “It’s a cool committee.”
Still, there are signs of larger desires. Johnson recently suggested that the Tauzin-Armey tax show, after hitting Fresno, Atlanta, and Dallas, take a spin through Iowa. Nothing political, of course, it’s just that Iowa seems as good a place as any to talk about taxes. After that, Johnson says, “we want to go to New Hampshire, too. That’s our goal.”
Tucker Carlson is a staffwriter for THE WEEKLY STANDARD.
